Un jeu de transpropriation du pere: The Abrahamic in Derrida

Adeel Hamza

The task that Freud had set for himself in Moses and Monotheism was 'to deprive the people of a man whom they take pride in as the greatest of their sons' and to leave aside 'what are supposed to be national interests'. This work has been read - and re-read - several times particularly in light of its ethico-political implications for the relations between Judaism-Christianity-Islam i.e. the Abrahamic, most notably by Edward Said in Freud and the Non-European. Most of this discussion however, has only focused on the sons of Abraham i.e. Ishmael and Isaac by giving in to the question of the proper name of the biblical patriarchs. By way of the disagreement between Derrida and Lacan on the question of the proper name in Freudian psychoanalysis, I want to conduct a different reading of the Genesis and try to understand the relation between the mothers in the biblical archive i.e. Sarah and Hagar. This reading would try to decipher the ethico-political implications of psychoanalytic readings of the biblical archive in order to respond to Derrida's injunction that 'psychoanalysis has not yet undertaken and thus still less succeeded in thinking, penetrating and changing the axioms of the ethical, the juridical and the political notably in the seismic places [Derrida's reference is to the land that constitutes historic Palestine here, though not exclusively that] where the theological phantasm of sovereignty quakes and where the most traumatic, let us say in a still confused manner the most cruel events of our day are being produced.